


all the honey in the hive

by scioscribe



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen, Relapsing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 10:30:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You’ll tell me I’m mixing my metaphors, but I’m only trying to be precise in describing your confusion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all the honey in the hive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tjs_whatnot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tjs_whatnot/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, tjs_whatnot! Thank you for the inspiration and the freedom to play around a little with the style--I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Spoilers throughout early S2.

 

There are a dozen pieces of paper in the trash that have your name at the top of them. Do you know what I did with them? I turned them into tight scrolls and pushed them inside the necks of beer bottles so you wouldn’t find anything unusual if you looked through the trash. I’ve learned not to take any chances with you and things we’ve both supposedly thrown out.

You think this attention to detail is a gift you’ve given me, but I learned that before I ever met you. I studied red and blue ink on thin textbook pages, I highlighted individual lines, I memorized the differences between valves and veins that looked almost identical. Everything was a matter of degree: discoloration, abnormality, arrhythmia, dappled imperfection. So I noticed that you called her Moriarty and not Irene and then I noticed that you stopped mentioning her at all. I learned about cuts, too: the precision with which what was killing someone could be excised. I also, and you know this, learned how that could go wrong.

You didn’t say her name. You said other things, instead. You bit into the beehive that was your brother, that was me and your brother, and you stirred the hornet’s nest. You’ll tell me that I’m mixing my metaphors, but I’m only trying to be precise in describing your confusion.

And you will use any tool you have right now to cut my words to ribbons. I know that, too.

But I always started with your name. Sherlock:

*

“It isn’t a relapse,” Sherlock said. He broke off the word like it was a piece of toffee: the brittle snap, the frivolity of it. “It was—a prefatory matter. It was a _prelapse_. Not that the Miltonian variety included drug paraphernalia, necessarily—”

It was two weeks before Christmas. Joan cooked rarely and had volunteered, in a champagne high off one of their best cases, to make duck for her family’s holiday dinner; Sherlock was now subjected to several practice runs and had proven irritatingly happy to give constructive criticism. She had, on his suggestion, decided to crisp some of the duck fat into chips, and the smell of grease was in her nose when she slid the kitchen drawer open all the way and dug in for a set of tongs. They came out with a latex tourniquet trailing from one end.

It was the translucent color of discarded snakeskin. More Milton, she thought numbly. She sat down at the kitchen table with it laying beige and pale against the wood. A very thin, not especially long strip of latex.

*

You tried to explain, and then you tried to obscure, and then you tried to justify.

I ordered a duck for Christmas, pre-cooked in a plastic steam hood. My mother was effusive about it, surprised I could do so well with so little training, but my brother was suspicious. I couldn’t really taste it. It had the springy quality of rubber.

At first, you said it must have languished in the back of that drawer for a year or more, but even as halfhearted as your initial sobriety seemed, I knew you better than that: you wouldn’t have accepted anything that could have ever been construed as failure. You either would have made a thorough top-to-bottom clean or you would have hired someone. Someone “trustworthy,” where, as a definition, I knew you would have used “not likely to ask about your secrets.”

Is that unfair? You made room for me in your life. You gave me a literal room—I can imagine you saying that, your eyebrows raised. You did, as you went to some strain to assure me, _accommodate_ me.

It was an effort, and then you told me it was a pleasure. I believed that then, and for what it’s worth, I believe that still, if only because it was a pleasure for me.

I planned for a different life, but I never loved it more than I loved the life we have together. The intellectual joy, the companionship. I had never met anyone else I would have been happy to live with forever.

It was a pleasure for me.

*

“It’s only the sensation,” he’d said at the kitchen table, while she burned the duck. “Just—the tightening of the skin. The pressure on the vein. It’s not the actual injection.”

“It’s another dry drunk.”

“AA terminology isn’t interchangeable with _NA_ terminology,” because he could always, whenever he was at a disadvantage, divide and subdivide whatever the actual argument was, he could always, at his whim, make it about semantics. “Call it a blunt needle.” Call it, he went on to say, a prelapse, Eve’s flirtation with the serpent. “You’ll have achieved an impossibility in making that duck dry as a bone.”

“Talk to Alfredo. Right _now_.”

Sherlock sat there for a long time. He said, “He won’t know anything about the duck,” and his voice was quiet and the corners of his mouth were crinkled and she took it for the apology that it was supposed to be. It wasn’t Sherlock’s fault that apologizing for blowing up someone’s life didn’t put all the pieces back together.

*

You told me—

No, even now I’m stopping myself, because you will argue with me. You will say that at worst you _implied_ it, as though enough complexity and enough vagueness will distort it until I lose track of the truth.

You told me that it had become an effort again.

You started to tell me I was exceptional and therefore, your exception. Except—and I’ve changed the word around as many times as I tried cooking the duck, I’ve played with it until it burned, until it was the dust on my fingertips from what you hid under the rolling pin (did I surprise you? Come home too early?)—one day I’m not going to be enough of a reason for you to not do what you want to do. You will realize that the hive is full and that you can’t tell the bees apart anymore and can’t remember why you wanted to.

You will see that the one thing I have in common with everyone else is not being you and that will collapse all the distinctions you’ve made. When you want it to. And more and more, you want it to.

I don’t know when our home became just yours again.

*

“He doesn’t go to the meetings,” Alfredo said.

Joan absorbed this—a single-stick crack to the crown of her head that left her stunned, her body thrumming but motionless, a dummy. She had watched him to leave, but she hadn’t followed him. She hadn’t absorbed his methods of distrust that far.

“Sometimes people drop out for a while without it—” but he remembered what she had been doing for a living when he met her, and he stopped, his mouth curled up tightly at one corner. “No,” he said, almost to himself. “It’s not a good sign.” They used to talk about things other than Sherlock but the last two times they’d met, it had been all this, with the furtive feeling of two people having an affair. Worry weighed down Joan’s life and pulled it out of shape.

She stirred her coffee. “Do you sponsor anyone else now?” It was a weak attempt to pretend things were normal, but he smiled all the same.

“One or two, since him.”

“Are they this much trouble?”

“One of them is more,” Alfredo said neutrally, and Joan heard it there, in his voice: the perspective she had lost.

*  
You started to make mistakes. You always made mistakes, but you used to say that they were temporary stops on the way to the truth, that every mistake was a herring successfully proven red. Then you started to say that the error belonged to the world for not being configured properly. Everything was proof that we should all change to meet your methods.

I said, after Bell, that you were running from your mistakes. You said that I of all people should understand the appeal of that.

No, I don’t think you were using then. I don’t even think you’re using now. I believe you when you say that all you’re after is pressure. But what I think that means for you is squeezing your life into narrower channels. The excuse it that you want to focus, but you’ll focus so hard and for so long that you won’t be able to see me at all. I’m already dim. I’m already in the corner of your eye. We all are.

You will start again. I’m not being smug and I’m not being reductive. It’s not that it’s only a matter of time, it’s that it’s only a matter of what matters, and as you prune your life down to only you, you will cut away every reason you have to stay on the path you’re on. One person in your life wasn’t who you thought she was. I was, but then I wasn’t, and whatever patina of specialness you put on me started to fade. Your brother was like you but then, alarmingly, he wasn’t—he had a greater capacity of forgiveness. Bell rejected you. Everyone’s life turned out to hold much more than you could fathom or easily reach and you are worn out with other people’s secrets.

You think I can’t understand that, but don’t you think, even as much as I care about you, that I’m worn out with yours?

*

Joan found him on the roof one night. He wasn’t wearing a coat and he wasn’t wearing any gloves. The sky was starless, an overturned bowl that held them in, and that was good, she decided, because looking at him, she felt like she would go spinning out into space.

He didn’t turn around, but he must have heard her, because he said, “It’s only that it keeps me up at night, the complexity of it, the _groomed_ and _cultivated_ intricacy of it, the hive. The way it looks so smooth and self-contained but inside it’s _pocked_. Then there are the stingers, of course. Only you could never fathom it only by looking. The complexity, I mean. The dangers of getting too close.”

“It’s three in the morning,” she said.

“So? You couldn’t sleep either. What drives you out here but my own groomed and cultivated complexity?”

“Don’t do that.”

“Why not? Honesty is something in short supply around here lately. You’ve been trying to spare my feelings, not tell me that you think I’m relapsing, or else suffering from—what was it you told Captain Gregson?—a clinical depression.”

“I think you’re hurting.”

“All those stingers,” he said. “And of course, with allergy, the potential for asphyxiation.”

She groped after whatever counterpoint there would be to him, whatever participation in his metaphor might make him realize that she was, still, the woman whose namesake crawled and buzzed in front of him, that whatever else there was inside them, in the way that mattered, they had seen each other truly.

She said, “But think of all the honey in the hive.”

*

I put myself at hazard for you even caring about you, when I knew that one day we could be right where we are now. I hope you can appreciate how much you mean to me, that I would do that, that I would risk this, that I would stay, right here, right now, instead of just leaving.

You told me once that you took heroin because otherwise the world was highlighted in all its particulars and it was too loud, one long shout that sometimes pitched up into a scream. You said the crowd overwhelmed you. Heroin gave you cotton for your mind.

This is not the letter I wrote you. What I put down on paper is less ambiguous, more supportive, less concerned with how I am going to come out of this alive. Less metaphorical, more straightforward. There are fewer accusations and more plans. I don’t say, in the letter that I wrote you, that I love you. I don’t tell you that you’re breaking my heart. I don’t say that I worry that I can stand losing my heart better than I can stand losing, again, my sense of self, that I regret having braided my life into yours. I was trained in professionalism three times over and I cannot tell you anything so bitter or even anything so sweet. I can only hope that you remember, or intuit, the existence of honey.

I read to you what I’ve written down. The words are weak, they’re pallid, they’re as soft as wax. You look down and then away, and I read the creases of your face like newsprint as I watch you try to decide what I am to you: the call that matters most or just more clamor in the crowd.


End file.
